Multilingual Online Marketing and SEO

Multilingual Online Marketing & SEO

Search engine optimization (SEO) is one of the most effective marketing tools available to businesses in the 21st century. From PPC and AdWords, to on-page optimisation and link-building, the case for SEO is really quite an easy one: if you rank highly on Google for certain key terms, your business is far more likely to succeed than if you don’t.

This is a given. But with international markets, the waters are even muddier. A whole host of cultural and linguistic intricacies must be considered when setting up a foreign language website and to ignore this, is to embark on a rather counterproductive online marketing campaign. It’s important that you speak to your target audience in a language that they not only understand, but in a natural way that resonates with them. There’s little point in having a professionally designed website, if the content lets it down.

So how does a business broaden its online presence in foreign lands? Well, before the SEO process begins, you’ll obviously need to have a foreign language website in the target market.

But before you do this, you must identify which is the best market to target, and this will vary greatly from business to business. You will have to do your research and see where there is a gap for you to exploit. If there are other similar businesses operating already in a specific country, then that’s a good sign as it demonstrates a demand for the product or service. However, be wary of too many companies, as it can be difficult to gain a foothold in an industry that is already saturated.

The next stage is to buy a locally hosted domain name in the target country. It may just be your company name with a local domain extension, for example .es in Spain or .fr in France, or if your company name is a direct reflection of the services you offer (e.g. ‘Web Design Services’), then you would be best translating your company name into the target language and buying that domain name instead. Just as important is your choice of web host as the server they use should be located in the target country – Google considers the IP address of the server in its ranking algorithms.

This lays the foundation for you to translate your website into the desired language. From a content standpoint, you must use a translation company that uses professionally qualified ‘in-country’ translators that translate INTO their native tongue.

Some businesses may be tempted by the many free website translation tools available online – whilst these can be useful if you need to understand the gist of a website in another language, you really don’t want to use such a tool for your own website, as they provide translations that are far from perfect.

It also pays to be wary of the linguistic nuances between dialects. For example, the French spoken in France, Belgium, Switzerland and Canada are substantially the same, but there are some key differences. There is no room for complacency with your foreign language website, e.g. courriel is ‘email’ in Canadian French but simply ‘email’ in France. And dejeuner is ‘lunch’ in France, but ‘breakfast’ in Belgium and Switzerland.

Localisation and SEO go hand-in-hand. You want professionally written, localised content – this means you musn’t translate your keywords from English. The correct dictionary translation of a keyword or phrase may NOT be what people use to search for the desired product or service locally, they may use colloquialisms or a different word that means the same thing. So in the same way as you identify your industry’s highest ranking keywords for the English market, such as via Google’s free keyword finder, you have to research the keywords for each target country, to ensure your foreign language website is properly optimized.

Once you have your keywords identified for each country, you can then incorporate these into a professionally translated website.

This is just the very basics of launching a foreign language website. The importance of localizing the website for the target market can’t be over-emphasized and there is a myriad of cultural and linguistic complexities that must be addressed in addition to the above – but that would make for an essay in itself!

About the author
Christian Arno is founder and Managing Director of Lingo24, a global translation services provider that specializes in website localization. With operations across four continents and clients in over sixty countries, Lingo24 are on course for a turnover of £3.7m in 2009.

You can comment on this article at Temi’s blog or you can discuss it at UK Webmaster SEO forum

Yes, you can use LinkedIn and other social media for SEO

Using LinkedIn for SEO

You know that owning a website is only half the job done. The website needs to draw a lot of traffic towards it, which is only possible through search engine optimisation. Sites that can be accessed or crawled by the search engines easily and to the maximum are visible to more number of eyeballs and it is therefore in your interest to seek better tips and ways to make the site worthy of attention from the search engines. This will in turn lead to more traffic visiting the website and you can take full advantage of such visibility as you go along.

You may have made use of many of the popular social networking sites to improve the visibility of your website, but may still be unsure about their impact. One site that can be of great use to you is LinkedIn. This site already enjoys great visibility and its ranking on the search engines is quite high. This will ensure that any association with this site would be of great benefit to your website as well. It is the spin off effect that will do the trick.

If you have already established contact and have a running association with this site, then it is time to make substantial improvements on the SEO front and given below are some tips on how to best make use of LinkedIn for this purpose:

a) Take the benefit of anchor text and links

Though this appears simple and easy to do, it is very crucial for increasing the SEO. The anchor text has to be used such that it provides the link from LinkedIn profile to your site and if you can manage to generate such links to many sites, you stand to gain substantially in terms of back links. Anchor text using appropriate key words is the answer towards making your site more SEO friendly.

The reason is also because important search engines like Google does a lot of checking of the anchor text in ranking sites and if you have managed the right key words relevant to your site, the ranking is improved to a great extent and your site will find favor with many search engines. The trick is to be creative about the key words and not fall prey to common names or terms.

b) Pay close attention to the key words

While composing your profile on LinkedIn, you must ensure that you select the most appropriate key words. The making of the profile would mean that you may have to mention about your hobbies, the type of jobs you have done, what you prefer and other salient features of your personality. You need to pepper your profile with the most relevant key words so that they link back to your site effortlessly.

c) Make sure you add connections

This is another area, which greatly influences the SEO of any site. You need to add sufficient number of connections to add visibility to the site and this will automatically improve the ranking of your site among the search engines.
d) Customise and tailor make the URL

Finally, it is important to really customize and tailor make the URL according to what you have on LinkedIn so that even the LinkedIn members are able to make changes to their own URLs and not be forced to make do with the one available on default. You can select a name that is close to you and can even opt for the name of your own website. This will definitely lend better visibility and will result in the SEO getting boosted further.

You can discuss this article and other search engine marketing related issues at UK Webmaster Forum

Influence of Web Hosting on SEO

Every website requires the services of a hosting provider to remain in the internet space and every website also requires optimum search engine optimisation from such a provider to get the highest page rank regularly.

It is possible that at times you may need to go in for a new host and you may be wondering whether you need to start the process all over again of identifying the right host to get your current page ranking. That is fortunately not necessary.

Your registered domain name will go a long way to retain your page rank. You can transfer this domain name to the new host and that is why you must hold on to the domain name when you are thinking of changing host as that is your identity on the internet cloud.
Search engines work by indexing not only the site but also the individual web pages. Through this, they also index the URLs of the individual web pages and it is thus necessary to retain the current URL form even when you shift to the new web hosting provider. You also need to retain the links that draw people to your site.

Do not make the mistake of going in for cheap service companies who claim to offer you web hosting at very nominal prices. Your aim should be to get the best quality and there is no point rushing into a cheap service by using cheap servers and back end coding done hurriedly. Some of these companies may offer you free disk space but might compromise on uptime with the result your website may not be always visible to visitors when they request for it. This will affect the traffic to your site and affect the existing page ranking.

Experts in the web hosting service field recommend their users to keep away from hosting their sites with multiple domains on the same server. It may make commercial sense to buy space on one server for multiple domains but since search engines may consider them as a ploy to link them together for better search engine ranking, it may not serve your purpose and may in fact be detrimental to the existing ranking. It is absolutely necessary that both web hosting and search engine optimisation work together to not only maintain an excellent reputation but also high page rankings.

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) for dating sites Part 1

This post is about Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) with particular focus on how it can be applied to a dating site, both regular dating sites and adult dating sites. It deals with the basics, an intermediate to advance SEO practitioner will not find much information he/she does not already know, however there are some dating site specific SEO resources you may find useful at the end of this article.
If you are completely new to SEO and looking for ways to improve your site popularity in search engines, you will find loads of useful information to get your site ranking well. The article will attempt to define search engine optimisation the way the author understands it and then discuss the two main parts to SEO, the conclusion gives tips on how to carry our basic optimisation on both regular and adult dating sites.

To begin from the beginning, perhaps we should attempt to define what SEO is in the hope that the definition will point us to where we need to be.
SEO, or to call it its full name, Search Engine Optimisation is the name given to a process whereby the components of a website such as the graphics, the textual contents including how site layout is optimised to ensure Search Engines crawls and ranks the site highly for topic the site is about.

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Double your organic search result with long tailed keywords

A little bit of lateral thinking can help you get more traffic to you site, as a matter of fact, not just slight traffic but huge significant traffic.  As we all know there are hundreds if not thousands of websites competition for the same keywords, most of them chasing after the same premium keyword that is most popular for their niche, there is not thing wrong with this, its just that using the so called long tailed keywords, you can actually generate much more traffic because you face stiffer competition for this keywords.

An excellent article about long tailed keywords was posted on Boss Cart ecommerce shopping software website, excerpts and link to the article follows:

There might be 1000 web sites or more just like yours on the internet.  So how
do you compete? The “big guys” dominate the search engines, and you might
find it hard to get into the first 20 pages. Many internet users won’t look beyond
the first page of the internet search, almost none look beyond the second or third
Pages. Again, how  do you compete? By knowing something that the “big guys”
don’t.  Enter the long tail.

 

full long tailed keywords article can be found here

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